Lake Huron’s Manitoulin Island contains a lake of its own, Lake Manitou. Lake Manitou is the world’s largest lake-on-an-island-in-a-lake.
Lake Manitou itself contains two islands; each is thus an island in a lake on an island in a lake.
The Next War
In September 1918, during the closing months of World War I, Everybody’s Magazine published a prophetic article by Eugene P. Lyle. “The War of 1938” (subtitled “A Terrible Warning Against a Premature Peace”) depicted a future in which the war-weary Allies accepted a peace offer in 1918 rather than pressing the conflict to a decisive victory.
In Lyle’s vision, Germany disarms and pays reparations but immediately begins planning a Prussian “night of consummation.” Her freed merchant fleet begins gathering material with the slogan “Germany must not be merely efficient, but self-sufficient,” and in 1938, at the end of a 20-year debt moratorium, she unleashes a blitzkrieg that sweeps Europe. England is stormed from the air, and her overseas dominions and the United States await a final onslaught in Egypt and India. The article ends:
In all the wretched lexicon of regret there is no word more futile than the ghastly word ‘if.’ It avails nothing, ever, and yet tonight the word is branded deep on the aching heart of humanity — ‘IF we had only seen the thing through in 1918!’
Readers called Lyle an “irresponsible alarmist,” a “sensation monger,” and a muckraker, but many of his fears would be realized. A few years after the armistice Pershing remarked to a friend, “They don’t know they were beaten in Berlin, and it will all have to be done all over again.”
Duet
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, ‘Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.’ Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?
— Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1971
Elsewhere
Three anecdotes of Newton’s absent-mindedness:
- His maid one day found him in his kitchen, holding an egg and boiling his watch.
- His nephew noted, “At some seldom times when he designed to dine in the hall, would turn to the left hand [rather than going straight], and go out into the street, where making a stop, when he found his mistake, he would hastily turn back & and then sometimes instead of going into hall, return to his chamber again.”
- From Thomas Moore’s diary: “Anecdote of Newton, showing his extreme absence–inviting a friend to dinner, & forgetting it–the friend arriving, & finding the philosopher in a fit of abstraction–Dinner brought up for one–the friend (without disturbing Newton) sitting down & dispatching it, and Newton, after recovering from his reverie, looking at the empty dishes & saying, ‘Well really, if it wasn’t for the proof before my eyes, I could have sworn that I had not yet dined.'”
English minister George Harvest was notoriously inattentive. On one occasion he accompanied Lord Onslow to Calais, awoke from an abstraction, and found that the two had become separated.
He could not speak a word of French, but recollecting that Lord Onslow was at the Silver Lion, he put a shilling in his mouth, and set himself in the attitude of a lion rampant. After exciting much wonder among the town’s people, a soldier guessing what he meant by this curious hieroglyphical exhibition, led him back to the Silver Lion, not sure at the same time whether he was restoring a maniac to his keepers, or a droll to his friends.
— The Percy Anecdotes, 1823
In a Word
curglaff
n. the shock felt on first plunging into cold water
Red Menace
Driving habits of communists, according to J. Edgar Hoover:
- Driving alternately at high and low rates of speed.
- Entering a heavily traveled intersection on a yellow light, hoping to lose any follower or cause an accident.
- Turning corners at high rates of speed and stopping abruptly.
- Suddenly leaving a car and walking hurriedly down a one-way street in the direction in which vehicle traffic is prohibited.
- Entering a dark street in a residential area at night, making a sharp U-turn, cutting into a side alley, and extinguishing the car’s lights.
- Driving to a rural area, taking a long walk in a field, then having another car meet them.
- Waiting until the last minute, then making a sharp left turn in front of oncoming traffic.
- Stopping at every filling station on the highway, walking around the car, always looking, then going on.
“Always there is the fear of being followed,” he wrote in Masters of Deceit (1958). “One Party couple registered at a motel, then the husband parked the car several miles away. He walked back and climbed through a side window. Maybe in this way he would conceal his next night’s lodging!”
“Plane Geometry”
‘Twas Euclid, and the theorem pi
Did plane and solid in the text,
All parallel were the radii,
And the ang-gulls convex’d.
“Beware the Wentworth-Smith, my son,
And the Loci that vacillate;
Beware the Axiom, and shun
The faithless Postulate.”
He took his Waterman in hand;
Long time the proper proof he sought;
Then rested he by the XYZ
And sat awhile in thought.
And as in inverse thought he sat
A brilliant proof, in lines of flame,
All neat and trim, it came to him,
Tangenting as it came.
“AB, CD,” reflected he–
The Waterman went snicker-snack–
He Q.E.D.-ed, and, proud indeed,
He trapezoided back.
“And hast thou proved the 29th?
Come to my arms, my radius boy!
O good for you! O one point two!”
He rhombused in his joy.
‘Twas Euclid, and the theorem pi
Did plane and solid in the text;
All parallel were the radii,
And the ang-gulls convex’d.
— Emma Rounds
Character Study
Story magazine nearly foundered for a lack of Ws. The publishers, Whit Burnett and Martha Foley, lived on Majorca, and their Spanish printer’s character set could not accommodate their English prose.
They bought some supplementary Ws from a Madrid foundry, but the new type was distractingly sharp on the page. So the printer advised them to “make those new letters old.”
“We sandpapered those Ws,” wrote Foley, “we stamped on them, we hammered them and hurled them around to give them in an hour all the wear and tear the printer’s other type had endured for many years. We finally subdued them so that they lost most of their prominence. But I have been W-conscious ever since.”
“A Snow Lady”
The accompanying picture shows what can be done with snow, by those who care to exercise their powers of modelling, and produce something more natural in appearance than the familiar old ‘Snow Man,’ built up after the figure of a Lowther Arcade Noah. During a lull in the severe frosts of last winter, two ladies (amateurs, who had never had a lesson in modelling), with the assistance of only a shovel and pair of scissors, erected and modelled the ‘Snow Lady’ in a garden near Pangbourne. No foundation of any kind was used, and no sticks or wires were concealed under the figure for the purpose of supporting head, body, or arms. An enlargement of the original photograph was shown at the Photographic Exhibition during last autumn, and gave rise to many remarks, sage and otherwise. A large number of those who looked at it pronounced it as ‘No doubt very cleverly got up–but all humbug!’ ‘Real snow? Not a bit of it! Quite impossible!’
— Strand, January 1892
Reservation Trouble
Socrates likes company. He wants to eat only if Plato wants to eat.
But Plato is angry at Socrates. He wants to eat only if Socrates does not want to eat.
Does Socrates want to eat?
(From Buridan’s Sophismata.)